Current Research

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Cheating The System

OK this is too good not to share. It turns out that some of my lemurs have learned that the payout for paying attention and complete a task correctly for a food reward is too much of a hassle. Instead, using their primate ingenuity, they have devised a fail safe plan. What are they doing?

They have started putting their hands on the middle of the screen or on one side of the screen and just stares at the chute. You see, the trials run automatically, and when they just leave their hands in that position, they either hit the correct or incorrect stimulus. As the trials cycle through, food reward will drop down at about 50% chance (at random). So, instead of paying attention to the task, the lemurs are just hoping they would by chance touch the correct stimulus. There is also one lemur that would continuously smash its hand all over the tablet non stop, hoping by chance it would hit the correct stimulus. Picture someone smashing all the buttons in an arcade machine ...

Well, one more UI update on SMARTA coming up this weekend so I can train them to correctly do the discrimination task.